Abstract:
Marcus Banks (1996: 8) argues that the life of ethnicity has been lived out through the
writings of academics rather than in the lives of the people they have studied and,
indeed, local discourses of ethnicity are remarkably understudied. This thesis takes a step
towards addressing the lack of attention given to local discourses of ethnicity by
exploring the ways in which sixteen New Zealand-born Gujaratis talked about their
Indianness in interviews conducted specifically for this project. Herbert Gans’ (1979)
notion of symbolic ethnicity is initially employed as a framework for understanding
participants’ narratives. Although this analysis gives an indication of the salience of
ethnicity in the lives of my participants, it fails to account for the complex dilemmas of
difference they expressed – the definition of ‘Indian culture’ in terms of difference from
other ‘cultures’ and the suggestion that they were different from other New Zealanders
by virtue of their Indianness. These issues are explained through an exploration of the
assumptions about the cultural and the person that were inherent in notions expressed
by participants of living in ‘two worlds’ and having to find a balance between them. This
analysis suggests that participants constructed both ‘culture’ and ‘the individual’ as highly
individuated categories. It is argued that these conceptualizations of ‘culture’ and ‘the
individual’ can be usefully understood in terms of reflexive, or liquid, modernity and
reflexive individualism. Under the conditions of late modernity, reflexive – that is, selfdirected
and self-oriented – thought and activity become idealised and individuals are
ideologically cast as the producers of their own biographies. My participants’ discussions
of their Indianness can, therefore, be understood to represent a kind of ‘self-reflexive
ethnicity’ that is centred on the person rather than on social networks or cultural
practices. This mode of ethnicity does not necessarily require the decline of such
networks and practices; they are simply reconfigured in terms of personal choice.
